Who Says A Computer Scientist Can’t Be A Great CEO?

I noticed that Scot Wingo, computer scientist and CEO of ChannelAdvisor, was sitting alone at the Ask the Expert table at the shop.org conference, so I sat down to ask him about his company. ChannelAdvisor is coming off a huge fourth quarter and is growing at the rate of 60% per year. As its name suggests, the company advises clients in multiple online channels, including comparison shopping, search marketing and marketplaces like eBay and Amazon.

The company was spun out of Overture, formerly the paid search part of Yahoo, and is now backed by a venture capital firm. Customers include a hundred large retailers, including Sharper Image, J & R Music World, Mens' Wearhouse and others, but half of the clients are small and medium size businesses, many of whom got their start on eBay and now want to branch out into other channels as well.

Later on, at the event's dinner under the palms, I found myself chatting with an employee (anonymous) at ChannelAdvisor, who advised me that Mr. Wingo is the kind of guy who makes you want to join his team the first time you talk to him. Nice to hear about a company with this kind of esprit de corps.

Sign up to our newsletters

Latest Jobs:

Company of the Week

SK&A is a leading provider of U.S. healthcare information solutions and databases. As part of IMS Health, SK&A researches and maintains contact and profiling data for over 2 million healthcare providers, including 800,000+ prescribers. SK&A's data supports research and marketing initiatives for life sciences, medical device, managed healthcare, direct marketing, publishing, education and more. SK&A's proprietary databases are telephone-verified twice per year from its world class Research Centers. SK&A enables multi-channel marketing and sets the standard for data quality and reliability. SK&A's customers include many of America's most recognized healthcare, publishing and pharmaceutical institutions.